Table of contents for Spring 2021 in Scout

Road trip! So much to organise ahead of time before leaving the big city. Oversized map showing all the essentials, including petrol stations open 24/7? Tick. List of the cleanest public toilets? Tick. Best cheap eats under 800 calories? Tick. Insta-worthy scenic selfie spots? Tick. Cocktails? [Insert the sound of crickets.] After I’d Scouted out Wellington’s cocktails for an earlier issue, it was time to tour the heartlands. For this story, I headed for the upper-middle of Middle Earth, the central North Island. Having been raised in a collection of small towns in the region, to my kid self these cities were the “Big Smoke”. I was actually about to have my first grown-up nights out in Palmerston North, Hamilton and Tauranga. And I was genuinely excited. The Fat Farmer…

Eat your greens, sit up straight and avoid alleyways that look as though they’ll do you mischief. Who wasn’t taught that as a child? But while our mothers might have been right about some things, they couldn’t have known that in 2021, laneways and other off-the-beaten track locations are often where the best bars, cafés and restaurants can be found. It’s especially true in Dunedin where tiny eateries and bars, sometimes with minimal signage, offer some of the city’s best foodie experiences. From apple crumble gelato and chocolate vodka to mānuka honey pilsner and some of the best toasted sandwiches to ever pass your lips, if you know where to look, Dunedin will deliver the goodies. Burger Plant The long, flat thoroughfare that slices through North Dunedin is nicknamed Fatty…

Gannet Safaris Overland Every one of the team of 10 drivers at Gannet Safaris Overland has a story to tell about the incredibly special private nature reserve on which 20,000 gannets meet their mates, build their nests and hatch their babies each year. You might come across Graham, who’s been hosting tours for more than 25 years, or Jan, who’ll tell you what the gannet colony looks like from the sky (she’s a stunt pilot who flies her own restored vintage Gipsy Moth). And then there’s everyone’s favourite English gentleman, Tony Morris, who worked the farmland at Cape Kidnappers as a young’un, and has been observing his favourite migratory birds ever since. He was first to spot early eggs up on the headland in August last year – ahead of…

The challenge was simple enough: give up my nasty habit of driving a 7-litre V8 Lincoln Continental and embrace the carbon-friendly life of Mevo on a tour of some of Wellington’s most sustainable businesses. Like I did, you might be wondering, “What’s Mevo?” The brainchild of Erik Zydervelt and Finn Lawrence, it’s a new on-demand car rental service. Think of those scooters that now command most of our city footpaths, but on steroids. Sustainable steroids, of course, because Mevo uses Audi e-tron wagons and VW Polos, which are scattered around the city for you to book on an app and pick up. When you’re done driving, you can park the car in most places around town – except, curiously enough, where I live. And if you hire the more expensive…

As part of my day job in the rag trade, I attended a symposium on the prevalence of black clothing in the New Zealand fashion industry and the reasons for it. It took a panel of experts and an entire evening to come to the conclusion that we’re conservative and we like the All Blacks. I am not what you would generally consider conservative and don’t care much about brand AB, but I do have a lot of black T-shirts. In what seems like a different lifetime, I once spent some time visiting friends in Berlin, and while looking for something a little more interesting to drink than the ubiquitous lagers, I developed a taste for schwarzbier. The ever-imaginative Germans came up with that name, which translates as “black beer”,…

As with many an Aotearoa gem, if you fail to take a crucial turn as you swoop into Ōamaru, an hour and a half north of Dunedin, you’ll miss the staggering genius of this stunning east coast Otago town. So stop. Do a U-turn. Head straight back down Thames Street, and a wonderful world awaits: an untouched historic quarter, a steampunk museum, an apothecary, a craft brewery, another craft brewery, gorgeous galleries and, to top it all off, the Pacific Ocean. I could go on – and indeed I will. But first, the history. You can get this yourself at the charming Whitestone City museum on Harbour Street, housed in one of the glorious white stone buildings that make up the Victorian area. Yes, I too thought everything was named…

My family are from Rotorua – the grandparents started up a department store there, Mathias Drapery, and I spent my Auckland childhood visiting the cousins every year, mostly at Christmas. I remember the mellifluous waiata, I remember the sulphur smell, I remember the rēwena (potato bread). Later, I filmed an episode on Rotorua for Taste NZ and discovered Māori cooking with master weaver Emily Schuster. I learned how to make fry bread, oven hāngī, boil-up with kūmara dumplings and hot pool-steamed kamokamo (squash) and freshwater kūura (crayfish). It was Emily who explained the importance of whakapapa – if you don’t know where you come from, you can’t know who you are. But I digress, and that is a tendency of mine. Photographer Sally Tagg and I hopped into the rental…

There’s no doubt that Jess Quinn is an incredibly brave woman. The model, Dancing with the Stars darling and social media sensation battled cancer as a nine-year-old and had to learn to walk again after a life-saving leg amputation. She has, however, developed a fear of flying. “It’s weird – as a kid we used to go on family holidays and the flight was probably the highlight for me,” she says. “I loved flying. I can’t think of a tipping point or anything, but over the last 10 years I’ve become really anxious about getting on a plane.” To help her overcome the nerves, Jess has teamed up with herbal supplement company BraveFace and agreed to take part in an intensive Flying Without Fear course with psychologist Grant Amos to…

Empire of Pain Pan Macmillan, $39.99 In Empire of Pain, investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe does a magnificent job of chronicling the questionable tactics and jaw-dropping greed of the Sackler family and their company Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of the painkiller OxyContin, which is widely believed to be the root cause of the US opioid crisis. Patrick’s meticulous reporting is weaved into a sweeping saga that follows three generations of Sacklers, from their 1952 purchase of Purdue Frederick, a stodgy pharmaceutical company known for laxatives and earwax remover, to October 2020, when the company was finally overwhelmed by lawsuits against its signature product, OxyContin. The first part of the book focuses on eldest brother Arthur, who wrote the playbook for selling pharmaceuticals and made the majority of his fortune with Valium.…

1. Pucker up I love lipsticks, but the packaging can cause a twinge of guilt. If you’re travelling light, this tinted lip balm from Aotearoad is the bomb. Not only does the raspberry and rosehip give you that little bit of holiday glam, but it also comes in a plastic-free compostable paper tube. Mmmmwah! SKL 2. Allpress-ent and accounted for Leading Kiwi coffee roaster Allpress is now serving up its signature espresso blend in a recyclable capsule for those of us who like a machine-made coffee. I tested it on my coffee-connoisseur other half and he gave it the big thumbs up. Me, I’ll wait till 2022 when a decaf version comes out. SKL 3. Packing it on The Lynn down jacket from Oamaru company Moke is your all-season holiday…

Before Covid, some years I’d spend more of my time overseas than I would in Wellington – in the last few years I’ve worked in Israel, Italy, Romania, London, New York and Los Angeles, as well as attending the Toronto International Film Festival each year. Thanks to Covid, this is probably the longest I’ve ever stayed in one place. But being home has actually been great because Wellington is so beautiful and because the last year has been a fruitful one for us. My husband [writer Stuart McKenzie] and I wrote a play, Transmission, about our government’s response to the pandemic, which recently played at Bats Theatre. I’ve also been able to do a lot of acting coaching from home, which sometimes means getting up in the middle of the…

Thursday 11.30AM A morning ferry and a coffee is a great combo, and in Sydney, San Francisco and Istanbul, I’ve found it’s an excellent way to start the day. Today’s journey from downtown Auckland to Devonport may not be transporting me to Manly, Sausalito or Asia Minor, but it still feels damn good after more than a year beached on Kiwi shores. It’s a regular workday morning on the inner Waitematā, and Auckland’s Ferry Building slowly recedes as Fullers’ Te Kotuku passes by The Lighthouse on Queens Wharf, artist Michael Parekowhai’s landmark reimagining of a New Zealand state house. 12PM No one’s ever going to mistake boxy Victoria Wharf for an architectural gem, but a couple of stops are essential before I start exploring Devonport’s village vibe. After doublechecking departure…

Even when it fell from favour, like platform shoes, I continued to wave the flag for chardonnay. Clearly, I didn’t have enough boozy lunches in the 1990s to put me off it, as did many who switched to sauvignon blanc or pinot gris. But not for me the acidic minerality with grassy notes of the former, or the alleged pear and citrus spice of the latter. Give me the big, fat full-bodied flavour of a (preferably oaky) chardonnay any day. Of course, I’m not a connoisseur, just an avid fan, but I’ve certainly done more than my fair share of sampling, and for years I’ve been telling visitors unfamiliar with our wine-growing regions: “You can’t go wrong with a Hawke’s Bay chardonnay.” “That’s safe and sound advice,” agrees Jen Parr,…

I don’t think I had even heard the term “minibreak” until Bridget Jones went on one in her original diary. Until then they were just “weekends away”. But a minibreak sounds a tad more organised, which is good, because in the gap between expectation and reality many a weekend away – and I’ll wager a marriage or 10,000 – has come a cropper. I remember, when we lived in Wellington, a colleague of mine speaking vaguely of a lovely country hotel at Castlepoint in the Wairarapa. My beloved and I were recently returned from living in the UK, where lovely country hotels abound, and I had been missing such, so one Friday night after work we set off over the Remutaka Hill in search of this one. It was before…